by Lynn Austin
‘‘Suit yourself,’’ she said, with a shrug. She handed him the coffee. ‘‘Here you go. I’m Aunt Batty, by the way. Who might you be?’’
‘‘My name’s Gabe...Gabriel Harper.’’
Aunt Batty looked thoughtful. ‘‘Gabriel, eh? I once knew another angel by the name of Gabriel. You any relation? You do look kind of familiar....’’
He gave a nervous laugh. ‘‘I’m really sorry to disappoint everyone but I’m not an angel. Far from it, I’m afraid.’’ He took a sip of coffee. ‘‘Mmm! This tastes as good as it smells. Thank you, ma’am.’’
‘‘Would you like some pancakes to go with that?’’ Aunt Batty asked. ‘‘My pancakes are delicious, I must say. I have a secret ingredient— so secret that even Idon’t know what it is.’’
He smiled slightly as she howled at her own joke. ‘‘Sure...Thank you very much, ma’am.’’
His attention seemed drawn to something in the doorway behind me so I turned to look. All three kids were trying to sneak into the room. ‘‘Everyone out!’’ I said. ‘‘This isn’t a sideshow. Mr. Harper deserves a little privacy.’’ I didn’t want them getting friendly and feeling Mr. Harper’s loss when he either died or left us again. I tried to herd them out but he overruled me.
‘‘No, it’s all right,’’ he said in his deep, soft voice. ‘‘I wouldn’t mind some company.’’
I gave up and fled to the kitchen to get his breakfast. The kids had left three pancakes sitting all by themselves on the platter. I put them on a clean plate, dabbed a mound of apple butter on top, and brought them in to Mr. Harper. I was only gone a minute or two, but in that time Winky managed to waddle in to join the crowd and the gray cat decided to sprawl herself across the foot of his bed. Before I had a chance to shoo them out, the orange cat jumped onto the bed, too, carrying Becky’s mitten in her mouth as if hauling a kitten around by the scruff of the neck.
‘‘Oh, look,’’ Becky said. ‘‘Arabella brought you her kitten.’’
Gabe stared at the cat, squinting his eyes as if he wasn’t sure if he was seeing things or not. Arabella dropped the mitten in his lap then lay down beside him, purring and kneading his leg with her paws.
‘‘That’s the sorriest-looking kitten I’ve ever seen,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s really my mitten,’’ Becky said in a loud whisper. ‘‘Promise you won’t tell her?’’
Gabe laughed, and the sound of it reminded me again of the low notes on a church organ—the ones that tug on your heart and punch you in the stomach. The kids all laughed along with him and I knew I’d be fighting a losing battle if I tried to keep them away from him. I gave him his breakfast plate, then slipped from the room to go upstairs and make the beds.
It had turned out to be a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the snow was melting, Aunt Batty had given me a much-needed helping hand, and it looked as though Gabe Harper might live after all. I knew I should feel lighthearted, but try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more trouble coming down the road. Maybe that’s because trouble had been following me around like Aunt Batty’s dog for such a long time that I’d forgotten what it was like to take a step and not have it underfoot.
I smoothed the coverlet on my bed, then stared out the window, listening to the steady sound of water dripping as icicles thawed in the sun. The snow is melting!That meant that the snow in Aunt Batty’s kitchen would be melting, too! I’d have to figure out a way to protect all her belongings.
As I pondered what to do, I saw Alvin Greer’s truck slowly drive down the road beyond the house, heading toward Deer Springs. If the roads were passable, I could drive Mr. Harper into town to see the doctor. But he couldn’t very well go in his long johns, and I hadn’t washed his clothes yet.
I hesitated, then opened Sam’s bureau drawer. My husband’s clothes lay neatly folded, as if he’d left them there only yesterday. It was the first time I’d handled Sam’s things since he’d died. I picked up one of his work-worn flannel shirts, surprised to find that my grief was gone, leaving a brown empty place, like the spot that’s left after you’ve yanked a flower out by its roots. I held the shirt to my cheek. It still smelled like Sam. But when I tried to picture his face I couldn’t recall it. Maybe that was part of my punishment. Maybe all of my troubles were my punishment for lying to Sam like I did.
Even so, I missed him. Not just because the kids needed a daddy or because of all the work I had to do now that he was gone, or even because of all the loneliness he’d left behind. But because Sam had truly loved me. I was always very certain of that. He loved me. And I missed feeling loved.
I chose a clean set of clothes for Mr. Harper to wear and closed the drawer again. On my way past Becky’s room I stopped to make up her bed, but it was already made. Aunt Batty’s work, no doubt. Then I spied the photograph she’d brought from home sitting on Becky’s dresser. I picked up the brass frame and studied the picture.
A pleasant-looking man about thirty-some years old sat slumped on a chair in front of Aunt Batty’s cottage with a blanket over his legs. He was an invalid, thin and ill-looking, with dark, mournful eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. The young woman who stood behind him had rested her hand on his shoulder, and he had lifted his own hand to tenderly cover hers. He wore a wed-ding ring on his finger. The girl stood in a bashful pose. Her head, which had a circle of flowers on it, was tilted away from the camera, and her round shoulders slouched forward. She was barefooted. I looked at her closely—it was a plump, youthful Aunt Batty.
Hadn’t she just told me that she’d once taken care of an invalid, shaving him and all? I looked at their joined hands, then at their faces again, and thought I saw in their expressions much more than a nurse and her patient.
Secrets.
Heaven knows I had plenty of my own. Gabe Harper obviously had his secrets. Why not Aunt Batty, too? I thought of a sermon about secrets I’d once heard in a church in Montgomery, Alabama, and I shuddered. The preacher had scared me half to death with his frightening words: ‘‘You may be sure that your sin will find you out!’’I pictured sin like a long-nosed bloodhound, tracking you wherever you went, sniffing your trail of misdeeds, baying out loud for all the world to hear once it had you up a tree.
I set Aunt Batty’s photograph back where I’d found it and went downstairs. Everyone was still crowded in Gabe’s room, laughing.
‘‘I hate to break up this party,’’ I said crossly, sticking my head in the door, ‘‘but the snow is melting. Aunt Batty, you and the kids had better get down to your cottage and pack up some of your things or they’re going to get ruined.’’
‘‘Oh, we were just talking about my roof,’’ she said as gleefully as a child. ‘‘Don’t worry, Gabe says he’ll fix it for me.’’
I lost my temper. Was I the only responsible adult around here? ‘‘Mr. Harper has just taken one tiny step back from death’s door. He isn’t about to be climbing up on your roof anytime soon. And even if he could get up there, that roof is going to take a lot more than a day’s work to fix.’’
Gabe looked away. The cheerful smile disappeared from Aunt Batty’s face. Even my kids started ducking their heads and shuffling their feet. I felt like the thundercloud that had just poured rain on their picnic.
‘‘Then I guess we’d better get busy,’’ Aunt Batty said quietly. ‘‘Come on.’’ She made a sweeping motion with her arm, and the dog, both cats, and all three kids followed her out of the room like she was the Pied Piper. I was left alone with Gabe.
‘‘I know that I’m still not completely well,’’ he said, fingering the mitten Arabella had left behind. ‘‘I’m sorry if I misled Aunt Batty about her roof. I didn’t mean to.’’
Something about the easy way he said her name struck me as wrong. It was one thing for her own family to call her ‘‘Batty,’’ but it seemed wrong for a stranger to do it. We stared at each other in silence for a moment before I remembered Sam’s clothes.
‘‘Here. Speaking
of getting better, I think the roads are thawing out, too. If you can get yourself dressed, I’ll drive you to Deer Springs to see the doctor.’’
‘‘No! Thank you, ma’am, but no!’’ His answer came so swiftly, so forcefully, he startled me. It was like I’d offered to take him to a voodoo witch doctor for treatment. As Aunt Peanut used to say, ‘‘something smelled fishy.’’ I waited, my hands on my hips, letting my silence demand an explanation from him.
‘‘I...uh...Idon’t have any money,’’ he finally said. ‘‘I can’t pay for a doctor.’’
‘‘That doesn’t matter. Dr. Gilbert is real nice about letting folks pay any way they can. I could bring him a chicken and some eggs and milk—’’
‘‘No! Thank you, but you’ve done too much for me already. As it stands, I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for saving my life.’’
I gestured impatiently. ‘‘Fiddlesticks! I plan to get plenty of work out of you once you’re feeling better—like fixing Aunt Batty’s roof, for one thing. I’m just not sure you’re out of the woods yet, and I’d rest easier if you’d let a doctor take a look at your leg.’’
‘‘I’ll be fine.’’
I could see by the way he stuck out his chin and held my eyes with his own that he wasn’t going to budge. As I stared back, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than the money he was worried about. A funny feeling suddenly shivered through me— what if he really wasan angel? What if a doctor would be able to tell somehow?
I shook myself to dismiss such a silly thought. There were no such things as angels.
‘‘Listen, if you’re sure you don’t want to see a doctor, then I’d better go help Aunt Batty for a while. Can I get you anything before I leave?’’
‘‘No, thank you.’’ He sank back against the pillows, and I could see that he’d used up all his strength. I put Sam’s clothes on the dresser top and left Gabe alone to rest.
I spent most of the day hauling stuff up the hill from Aunt Batty’s cottage to my house. I’d loaded my father-in-law’s truck with empty apple crates and driven them down there, thinking she could pack up her things and store them in her bedroom where they would stay dry. But Aunt Batty had insisted on bringing all of her most precious books up here. This old farmhouse was already cluttered to the rafters with stuff, since it had been in Sam’s family for so many years, but now I had books piled everywhere, too. When we ran out of space in the other rooms, I stacked a load of books in the spare room with Mr. Harper. The commotion woke him up. He stared at the boxes in amazement.
‘‘Where does Aunt Batty live? In the public library?’’
‘‘Oh, you don’t know the half of it!’’ I said, leaning against the doorframe to rest. ‘‘These are just her specialbooks. There are twice as many still down there that she didn’t make us bring.’’
‘‘I guess we won’t run out of reading material any time soon.’’ He smiled and acted all polite and friendly, but for some reason I was afraid to be friendly in return. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him—my instincts told me that he was perfectly trustworthy. But I found myself getting snappish with him for the same unknown reason that I always barked at my kids when I didn’t really mean to.
‘‘Help yourself,’’ I said, turning away. ‘‘I certainly don’t have time to read.’’
Toward evening Mr. Harper’s fever went back up a little bit, but it wasn’t nearly as high as it had been the past few days. ‘‘I know just the thing to cool him off,’’ Aunt Batty said after we finished washing the supper dishes. She should have been tuckered out from all the work we’d done that day, but she put on her coat and a pair of boots and disappeared out the back door with a kerosene lantern. She was gone for such a long time that I just about gave her up for lost. But she finally reappeared, all out of breath, lugging a crazy-looking bucket with a crank on top. The kids crowded around to see the mysterious contraption.
‘‘It’s an ice-cream churn,’’ she announced. ‘‘You kids like ice cream?’’ They stared at her, all wide-eyed and slack-mouthed as if she’d just offered them a trip to the moon for a slice of green cheese. I don’t think they’d eaten ice cream but once or twice in their whole lives, what with Grandpa Wyatt running things the way he did.
Aunt Batty soon had everyone buzzing around like a hive of worker bees with herself as the queen. ‘‘You run down to the cellar and fetch me a jar of your mama’s canned peaches,’’ she told Luke. ‘‘You grab your mittens, boy, and fill this full of snow,’’ she said, handing Jimmy a pail. She turned to Becky and me. ‘‘We’re going to need some fresh cream, some sugar, and some pickling salt. You have any pickling salt, Toots?’’
When she had everything ready, Aunt Batty set the churn right outside Gabe’s bedroom, opening the door wide and propping him up in bed so he could watch. The kids squabbled over who was going to crank the handle, so Aunt Batty got the egg timer and made them all take turns. Not one to waste time, she took out her knitting needles and a ball of yarn and began casting-on stitches while they churned.
‘‘Whatcha making?’’ Becky asked her.
‘‘Well, I thought maybe Gabe could use a new pair of socks, seeing as how his have so many holes in the toes.’’
‘‘When you finish the socks,’’ Becky asked, ‘‘could you knit Arabella some new kittens? Mama took my mittens away from her again, and Arabella wants babies sobad.’’
‘‘What a wonderful idea!’’ Aunt Batty said. ‘‘Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll start the first kitten right now. What color shall we make him?’’
I shook my head as Becky sorted through balls of yarn in Aunt Batty’s knitting basket, picking out two brown kittens and a white one. Now my children were losing their minds, too.
When the ice cream was finally ready, the kids started all hollering at once. ‘‘Let me taste! No, me first! Let me try it!’’
‘‘I think we should let Mr. Harper have the first taste,’’ Aunt Batty decided. ‘‘He’s our guest, after all, and we’re making it to cool his fever, remember?’’ She scooped some into a bowl and brought it to Gabe. The kids’ tongues hung nearly down to the floor as he closed his eyes and savored the first bite.
‘‘Mmm...Mmm! I believe I must have died and gone to heaven!’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve never tasted anything this good here on earth!’’
The kids did more hopping around than a flea circus as they waited for Aunt Batty to dish up their portions. I tasted mine and discovered that Gabe was right—it was the most delicious thing I’d eaten in a long, long time.
‘‘Do angels eat ice cream up in heaven, Mr. Harper?’’ Becky asked after she’d eaten a few bites.
‘‘My daddy’s up in heaven and he would really like this,’’ Jimmy added.
What little I could see of Gabe’s pale, bearded cheeks flushed bright pink. ‘‘I...uh...Ididn’t mean it that way. I’m not really—’’
‘‘Of course they do,’’ Aunt Batty cut in. ‘‘The Bible says that heaven is paradise, and how in the world could any place be paradise without ice cream?’’
‘‘Or candy,’’ Jimmy said.
‘‘And kitty cats.’’ Becky bent to let Arabella lick ice cream off her fingers. ‘‘Heaven must have kitty cats.’’
‘‘F-fishing holes.’’
Luke’s voice was so soft I wasn’t sure if I’d heard right or not. But then I remembered the lazy summer evenings when Sam had taken his sons fishing. Luke must be remembering them, too.
‘‘Yeah, our daddy liked to go fishing,’’ Jimmy said. ‘‘Will they let him go fishing up in heaven?’’
‘‘It’s paradise!’’ Aunt Batty exclaimed, her arms spread wide. And that seemed to answer all of their questions. ‘‘Who wants more ice cream?’’
Between the six of us we finished off the entire batch. Gabe said he felt cured for certain, but I touched his brow and it still felt warmer than it should. Aunt Batty decided to top off the evening by reading us some ‘‘literature,’’ as s
he called it. Now, I’d read the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow before, but I’d never noticed how much dying there was in all of them—the blacksmith’s wife in ‘‘The Village Blacksmith,’’ the sea captain’s little girl in ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’’ When I’d listened to all I could stand, I chased the kids up to bed, then lit into Aunt Batty like an angry mama bear.
‘‘I don’t ever want you reading poems about sadness and dying to my kids again, you hear me? We’ve seen enough death!’’ My harsh words bounced right off her like hail off a tin roof.
‘‘Dying is simply part of living, Toots.’’ Her childlike smile never left her face as her knitting needles flew. ‘‘Everything in the whole world has to die sometime. That’s the way God made things.’’
‘‘Then I don’t think God cares about life very much.’’
‘‘Oh, that’s not true!’’ Her knitting fell to the floor as she stood and gripped my arm. Concern was written all over her face. ‘‘Life is very precious to God. That’s why He made it so fragile and so short.’’
‘‘That makes absolutely no sense.’’
‘‘Yes, it does. He made it fragile so we would treasure it, just like He does. You’re not nearly as careful with your cast-iron frying pans as you are with your good china, are you? God wanted life to be precious to us—so He made it as frail as fine china.’’
I sat at the kitchen table that night after everyone else had gone to bed, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Aunt Batty’s words rankled me, like a sliver that was too deep to dig out. Why hadn’t I treasured my husband’s life while I had the chance? Why had I taken him for granted and used him like...like an old castiron frying pan? I didn’t have any answers, only regrets, so I finally decided to go up to bed. But when I stood up, the first thing I saw was Gabe Harper’s burlap bag and I remembered that I hadn’t finished reading that last story of his.
I pulled out the notebook labeled Prodigal Sonand found the place where I’d left off:
I said that Simon was my only brother, but that’s not quite true. Three of us brothers grew up together on the farm. Johnny was the youngest, I was the oldest, and Simon was in the middle. For reasons I’ve never understood, Johnny was my father’s favorite. Johnny knew it, too, and he lorded it over us.